Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro admires Tom Paine, the English-born American revolutionary whose 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense” galvanized support for independence from Great Britain, whose ...

Although the Enlightenment revolutionized human thought and transformed the world, it failed to produce a coherent theory of knowledge. The central reason is that the modernist systems of science and ...

The twenty-first century has been hard on the Enlightenment. Lauded as a foundational moment in the story of human progress—the font from which all civilized life supposedly sprang—its position and ...

For Immanuel Kant, the central theme of the Enlightenment—that great 18th century movement that emphasized the power of reason—was Sapere aude. This is usually translated as "Dare to know" or, more ...

Yoram Hazony goes further than he needs to in arguing that the U.S. Constitution isn’t a product of Enlightenment thinking. Yoram Hazony offers a corrective to blind faith in reason as the solution to ...

Most people would agree that progress is a good thing, and few would deny that there has been extraordinary progress over the course of human history, or that human existence has improved in ...

There is a theory gaining traction on fringe, right-wing websites that we are in a "civil war" caused by Democrats. The theory is vastly misplaced so let's get it right. No doubt there is cultural and ...